David Brooks, the aggressively moderate swell who writes aggressively moderate columns for The New York Times, is seldom so entertaining as when he gets haughty. It affronts him when people of any other political persuasion but his own make mock of his helpful suggestions on how to put the world right–well, center right, anyway–so he gets on his high horse and pens columns like this one:

The people pushing for gun restrictions have basically done the exact opposite of what I thought was wise. Instead of depolarizing the issue they have massively polarized it. The students from Parkland are being assisted by all the usual hyper-polarizing left-wing groups: Planned Parenthood, Move On and the Women’s March. The rhetoric has been extreme. Marco Rubio has been likened to a mass murderer while the N.R.A. has been called a terrorist organization.

My, my, my. No matter how many cucumber sandwiches we offer, our national Lady Bracknell won’t be assuaged this time. WE HAVE IGNORED HIM, AND HE WILL NOT BE IGNORED!

To dig into this a bit, I’m not aware of too many people likening Marco Rubio to a mass murderer. Few would give him credit for so much guts. People are likening him to various invertebrates and saying he’s a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Rifle Association, which commits the political sin, in BrooksWorld, of accuracy. As for the N.R.A., I don’t think of them as a terrorist organization. Terrorist organizations murder people in the name of their ideology. The N.R.A. is perfectly content to see people murdered in the name of their ideology. The moral difference isn’t great, but I’m happy to acknowledge it, for whatever it’s worth to them. As for hyper-polarizing left wing groups, none of the ones Brooks listed includes me. (Though they, much like the N.R.A., are composed of lots of ordinary people.) I’m just one of those unaffiliated folks who’d like to go see Black Panther without wondering if some frustrated, entitled prick with more ammo than brain cells is going to come into the theater and blow my head off as his last gesture against a world he hates. There are a lot of us. A lot more than the N.R.A.’s membership lists can boast, I’ll warrant.

Moving on.

Yet I have to admit that something bigger is going on. It could be that progressives understood something I didn’t. It could be that you can win more important victories through an aggressive cultural crusade than you can through legislation. Progressives could be on the verge of delegitimizing their foes, on guns but also much else, rendering them untouchable for anybody who wants to stay in polite society. That would produce social changes far vaster than limiting assault rifles.

Is Brooks about to admit that another human being knows something about the human condition that he doesn’t? Should I get my hopes up, or is this like when Trump holds one of those televised bipartisan meetings where he tries to sound reasonable, only to turn around and fuck everything up a few hours or days later? My money’s on the latter.

Two things have fundamentally changed the landscape. First, over the past two years conservatives have self-marginalized. In supporting Donald Trump they have tied themselves to a man whose racial prejudices, sexual behavior and personal morality put him beyond the pale of decent society.

Decent society does not include CPAC or the Republican Party, but that was true long before Trump showed up. Trump’s awful, David, but he didn’t make your party awful.

Second, progressives are getting better and more aggressive at silencing dissenting behavior. All sorts of formerly legitimate opinions have now been deemed beyond the pale on elite campuses.

Ah, excellent. Brooks must find a way to say both sides are equally problematic, so he goes to the right’s standby issue. In one case, we have a rancid, racist, backward movement that controls one of the country’s two major political parties, which means that it’s hard to avoid putting them in charge of the vast powers of the government at least some of the time. In the other case, we have students who try, and usually fail, to get Charles Murray and Ben Shapiro banned from campus. Sometimes they show up to their events and say rude things to them. A little tip, here, David. Few of us have ever set foot on elite campuses, and even fewer are affected by what’s happening on them now. A lot more of us have to live and work every day in the United States.

Oh, by the way, what formerly legitimate opinions are now deemed beyond the pale?

There are a number of formerly popular ideas that can now end your career: the belief that men and women have inherent psychological differences, the belief that marriage is between a man and a woman, opposition to affirmative action.

I guess in the first instance, Brooks is talking about James Damore, the Google guy who misused and misunderstood the science of gender differences, and then kept doubling down and being a colossal dick about it until he was, quite legitimately, fired for being an ill-informed, misogynist dick. (I guess it shocked Damore to discover that colossal dicks aren’t in a protected class.) The second belief, though certainly bound to make you unpopular in a lot of places, is practically a job requirement to teach at many religiously-affiliated schools. As for the third, that belief probably won’t end your career on campus, and even if it did, you could always join Charles Murray in the right-wing think tank world, where billionaires will pay you to write bitter screeds about how intolerant the academic world is. If that’s how a career ends, it’s a pretty soft death.

But semi-seriously, David, ideas come and go, waxing and waning in popularity. The thing about the university world is ideas have to keep passing tests to stay popular. Some ideas–life forms evolve through natural selection, gravity bends spacetime–keep beating their competition and stay. Others rise in popularity only to be supplanted or debunked. And some ideas go away because the people they hurt finally gain just enough power in the world to say, “Stop that. It hurts” and have someone listen. To expect ideas to retain stable, enduring popularity forever, just because, is foolish. The world, David, is allowed to move on and leave your pet notions behind. It’s called life.

What’s happening today is that certain ideas about gun rights, and maybe gun ownership itself, are being cast in the realm of the morally illegitimate and socially unacceptable.

It must be disappointing for gun nuts, after forty years of stacking the courts with right wingers who believe that the only unlimited constitutional right lies in the second clause of the Second Amendment’s single sentence, to discover that the fruits of their labor got a lot of people killed and pissed everybody else off, but again, that’s life. Maybe if they’d been less absolutist about asserting their right to carry military hardware around so they can dream dreams of one day fightin’ big gummint, we could’ve come to an understanding. Ah, well.

Continued school shootings could be just the thing that persuades the mainstream that conservatism is vulgar and socially illegitimate, somewhere between smoking and segregationism. If that kind of total victory is on offer for progressives, why should they take my advice and tone things down for the sake of a few small gun laws? The big prize here is not gun laws. It’s winning the culture war, with the gunfight as the final battle.

You’re quite right. Why should we? When we fought smoking, it wasn’t just because we didn’t like smoke. It was because people were dying horrible, preventable deaths while the cigarette manufacturers juiced their product to make sure there’d be more addicts to replace them and keep them hooked. When we fought segregation, we did so because it was one of our nation’s great crimes, and the people backing it were criminals, thieves, rapists, and murderers.

Though a direct comparison is hazardous, the Klan and the N.R.A. do have some things in common. Once upon time, the Klan, like the N.R.A. now, was a mainstream organization in American life. 6 million people belonged to the Klan at the height of its power in the mid 1920s. Politicians were members, many because they wanted to be, others because they felt they had to be. They had governors, legislators, members of Congress, and a Supreme Court justice among their number. Why did those numbers shrink? In part it was the Klan’s own behavior. The D.C. Stephenson case exposed the Klan’s corruption and its hypocritical claims of defending white womanhood. But it part it was because the drift of the 20th century was away from the Klan. Its formerly popular ideas of white supremacy backed up with violence became more abhorrent with each passing generation. People saw the simple, moral legitimacy of the Civil Rights struggle set against the bigoted moral bankruptcy of segregation and turned away from the Klan. Klansmen are no longer socially acceptable, except among Trumpists. They should never be socially acceptable again.

If the N.R.A. chooses to go down the path of the Klan, threatening those who question them while spreading paranoia and hatred, they’ll lose. Over time, they’ll bleed members who either age out and die off or just tire of the extreme rhetoric and lies, like millions of ex-Klansmen did. Movements against them will grow and gain confidence. Politicians will walk away, or lose their seats, and in the end, the N.R.A. will be as the Klan is, a small collection of bigoted, angry malcontents, watching old vids of Charleton Heston saying “From my cold dead hand” the way Klansmen watch their DVDs of Birth of a Nation (not the new one) and yearn for a return to the glorious past.

If that’s their fate, it doesn’t bother me a bit.

The only thing I’d say to my progressive friends is, be careful how you win your victories. It is one thing to win by persuasion and another thing to win by elite cultural intimidation. Illiberalism breeds illiberalism. Using elite power, whether economic or cultural, to silence less educated foes usually produces a backlash.

Uh-huh. You know, something, David, last month was Black History Month. I’m not sure you keep track of that, but during that month, one of the things that people like to do is read Martin Luther King’s Letter From A Birmingham Jail. In it, Martin Luther King addressed the David Brookses of his era who thought his protests were upsetting the delicate sensibilities of white southerners. I’ve never read their remarks to him, but I’m guessing they said something like what you’re saying here, or what you said in your column two weeks ago about how “It’s necessary to let people from Red America lead the way, and to show respect to gun owners at all points.”

David, the world’s a better, more just place, Martin Luther King ignored them. And so, even though I know it twists your shorts, I think it’s best if Parkland’s students, and the movement they’ve started, ignore the living fuck out of you.

Of the three published stories about the making of Dope Dealers From Outer Space, this was the one written earliest. It’s sets the conflict between the right-wing movie director Howard Zeleznick–or, as he likes to be called, Howard Zez–and his stepdaughter, Molly, which is touched on in “Stanny Couldn’t Make It”.

Molly is a smart young woman, nearing the end of her undergraduate studies in film at the (at the time quite new) USC film school. Like her mother, she’s much smarter than her stepfather, but unlike her mother, she’s happy to let him know that. Molly loves her mother but doesn’t understand why she married Howard, who seems to have little to recommend him besides comparative financial stability–Howard inherited a share of his family’s heavy harvester business, which he uses to finance his terrible films–and a disinclination to physical abuse, which does put Howard one up on Molly’s biological father, Duke. Still, a stable income and a lack of abuse strikes Molly as a depressing reason to marry someone as retrograde and foolish as Howard.

In “The Day Molly Got Into The Room”, Molly’s supposed to learn a bit about the movie business from sitting in on a meeting with Howard and his screenwriter, David Freem. Instead, she learns something about her mother, which shocks her but leaves her with a better understanding of some of the choices she’s made.

“The Day Molly Got Into The Room” is based to some degree on some people I know, and I won’t name them because I’m sure at least one of them would find it insulting. If that person does figure out which character is close to him, he should know that the character also has a lot of Donald Trump in him, so he should think very hard about where he ends and the Orange Menace begins.

You can’t find “The Day Molly Got Into The Room” online. It appears in Constellations, a Boston-based literary journal. You can buy it from Amazon.

If you buy it and read it, feel free to leave a comment or question below.

The first image comes from the fourth season of the TV sitcom Wings. In the episode “Goodbye, Old Friend” airplane mechanic Lowell Mather’s friend and mentor Weeb Gilroy passes away, and Lowell is asked to deliver the eulogy. But Lowell is not a words man, so he has no end of trouble penning something appropriate. In the end, he decides that in lieu of words, he’ll finish the project he and Weeb had been working on together for years: the restoration of an old biplane. He finishes the plane, and he gets Joe, his pilot friend, to fly it for him during Weeb’s funeral as a tribute. The show, presumably hampered by budget considerations, never shows the plane in the air, but the image I pictured of it buzzing the funeral stuck with me for decades afterward.

I’m a soft touch sometimes. Sue me.

The other image is more recent, and I remember it with less pleasure than I thought I would when I first saw it. When last year’s third presidential debate ended, Hillary Clinton had once again taken Donald Trump apart on stage, and you could tell that he knew it. Hillary had left her podium to shake hands with the moderator, meet her family, and wave to well-wishers in the audience–typical stuff politicians do, win or lose, at the ends of debates. Trump, by stark contrast, stayed behind the podium, seething. None of his family went near him. He’d been bested, by a woman, again, in front of the whole country, and he had no way of dealing with it. He just stood there, ripping pages from his notebook.

In the end, combining these two images was quite simple. Howard Zez is already established as my Trump stand-in, and putting him in a situation where he feels like he’s going to shine, as the one who delivers his brother Milford’s eulogy, puts him in a lovely situation for a comic face plant. And letting Howard’s sister deliver the coup de grace to his eulogy by flying the WWI plane she and Milford had been building over the funeral home let me to preserve the dynamic of the third presidential debate by having a woman show Howard up.

It was fun to write.

One more note. This is the first story I’ve written in this series told from Howard’s point of view. In other stories I’ve done, Howard comes of as a bluff, right-wing, vain, incompetent heel, which he certainly is. He’s Archie Bunker with more money and a camera. But when I wrote a story from his point of view, I had to find a way to connect with him, some aspect of me that I could see in him to humanize him. What I found was Howard-as-frustrated-artist. Howard decided to stay away from the family business to devote himself to making movies–a thing his has tremendous passion and no talent for. However much he tries to puff himself up, on some level he suspects that his relatives and friends think of his work as a joke, which contrasts sharply with the rest of the world’s utter indifference to it. Howard is desperate for acclaim and respect, and underneath his bluster he wonders if he’ll ever get it. I know I’ve felt like this from time to time, like I’m the only one who gives a damn whether I keep writing or not. And when I see social media posts from friends and relatives and strangers who seem to be doing so much better than I am, it makes me feel lousy about what I do and I wonder when or if it’ll get better, or if I am, in the end, any better at my art than Howard Zez is at his. It’s that insecurity, which I confront daily, that helped me connect with Howard Zez in “Two Ways To Say Goodbye To Milford”. To the extent that he isn’t just the two-dimensional butt of one of my jokes, that’s why.

We’ll most likely return to this next when my next story in the Zezverse, “The Day Molly Got Into Room”, appears in Constellations sometime in the spring of 2018.

“Stanny Couldn’t Make It” came out today in Across the Margins, and, as my practice will be with stories in this series–I’m currently calling it the Zezverse–come out, I have some notes to share about how this story came to be. So, short story trivia fans, prepare to feast.

–The fictional movie in the interview, The Agitator, has a real world counterpart, the 1962 Roger Corman feature The Intruder, written by Charles Beaumont (who wrote several of your favorite Twilight Zone episodes), and starring William Shatner, whose Canadian-ness and background as an actor at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival serves as a partial inspiration for the character of Jack Renner.)

–Stanny is the name of my 1st cousin. He’s very much alive.

–The story is written in the style of Onion AVClub Random Roles interviews, which are among my favorite things on this planet.

–The rise of Donald Trump contributed to the development of Howard Zez’s character. In his earliest incarnation, Howard was bumbling and conservative–but basically benign. As 2016 went by, he became more Trump-esque. Though, since the story is set in 1969, it’s probably better to think of him as a kind of proto-Trump.

There’s something about July 4th that usually gets me feeling contrary. It feels like such an aggressive, bombastic holiday, demanding emotions from me that I refuse to feel simply because they’re demanded of me.

My response to it has been to counter-program it, in my own quiet way, by watching movies that air my grievances about my usually-better-in-theory-than-in-practice country of origin. (It’s very Festivus, I know.) I sometimes let this go when my country and I are on better terms, but as you may have noticed from recent posts, our relationship has become strained recently.

So here’s this year’s list, which I quite enjoyed.

The Pentagon Wars

Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb

Do The Right Thing

Network

I traditionally include All the President’s Men in this list, but I’ve been watching it too much lately.

Occasionally, I make a dreadful life mistake and I read a pundit. I know, disgusting habit. I’m trying to quit, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. (Maybe pundits are lacing their columns with extra nicotine, like Brown and Williamson. Someone should look into that.) And so it was that I read Marc Theissen’s Washington Post column, “America Is On Its Way to Divorce Court“, calling for greater civility toward Republicans who are, at this moment, trying to shred my health insurance so rich people can have more money.

So if you can, disable your gag reflex, and we’ll dive right in.

There is a place for contempt in our public discourse. We should have contempt for a regime in North Korea that brutalized a young American student named Otto Warmbier. We should have contempt for a regime in Syria that uses poison gas to massacre innocent men, women and children. We should have contempt for Islamic State terrorists who behead Americans, burn people alive in cages and systematically rape Yazidi girls.

But we should not have contempt for each other.

Really, Marc? We shouldn’t have contempt for each other? Why not? Do all the others who do nasty things live outside our borders or follow religions that aren’t dominant here? Our current President, just for one, is a serial rapist and con man who ignores crimes committed by our local Nazis. And since those local Nazis are presumably also part of our geographically determined “each other”, we’re not allowed to have contempt for them either?

Yet, we do. Our politics today is descending into a bitter spiral of contempt. And we saw the consequences in the attempted assassination of Republican members of Congress on a baseball field in Alexandria, Va., last week. Back when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was shot in 2011, many on the left were quick to blame conservative political rhetoric — falsely it turned out. But the attack on Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and his colleagues was politically motivated. The assassin volunteered for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), called President Trump a “traitor” on social media and, according to witnesses, asked if the players were Republicans before opening fire.

Well, I suppose it would be unfair to bring up the murder of George Tiller (egged on by the now disgraced and ever disgraceful Bill O’Reilly) or the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal building, both of which involved plenty of right-wing political motivation. But both-sideism is a boring game, so fine, if it makes you feel better, I don’t like politically motivated violence any more than you do, Marc. Not only is it ethically dubious at best, but on a purely practical level, it usually creates more problems than it solves. (See Marcus Brutus–including the version of him in the play that has the Trump people so pissed off.) Barack Obama expressed it well, “However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.”

See, Marc, the last President covered the only halfway useful message of your column in 138 characters. The Post could have saved column inches by just printing that instead.

Onward.

No one is responsible except the would-be assassin. But his actions should serve as a wake-up call that the demonization of our fellow Americans who disagree with us has gone too far. The culture of contempt permeating our politics has now had near-fatal consequences. We need to put on the brakes and learn how to distinguish once again between our opponents and our enemies.

Oh, Marc, you’ve only just now noticed that politics in this country can be a lethal business. Oh, diddums. You know who’s known this for a long time? Women and pretty much every ethnic, racial, and sexual minority in this country going back to those whom white people enslaved and those whose land white people stole. To take just one example, here’s how Americans expressed their politics just a grandfather ago.

Notice the guy near bottom left corner grinning. This picture of a lynching was taken in 1930. If you hurry and catch someone in a nursing home before the Senate kills their funding, you might find someone who remembers what this was like. My Dad, a black man in New Orleans during this period, lived with the threat every day, which was why he always made it a point to tell me to be careful every time I went outside.

Many of us have been aware of the difference between opponents and enemies for some time, long enough to know that the difference between them is often so fine as to become invisible.

Case in point: A few weeks before the Alexandria shooting, Hillary Clinton gave a commencement speech at Wellesley College where she declared that Trump’s budget is “an attack of unimaginable cruelty on the most vulnerable among us, the youngest, the oldest, the poorest” (emphasis added). No, it is not. Using nerve agent on the innocent is “an attack of unimaginable cruelty.” Putting a hapless college student into a coma is an “attack of unimaginable cruelty.” Reducing the growth of government spending is not.

I have a pretty dark imagination, so I consider both of these deeds attacks of perfectly imaginable cruelty. But whether you’re killed through government action or through deliberate government neglect (“Reducing the growth of government spending” is French for neglecting the vulnerable), you’re equally dead.

Think for a moment what Clinton was saying: It’s not simply that Democrats and Republicans have an honest disagreement about how best to help the most vulnerable among us. In Clinton’s telling, Republicans are waging war on the vulnerable. That is toxic.

No. We’re not having an honest disagreement at the moment. If we were, Republicans would own up to not really wanting to help the most vulnerable. That would be contemptible on its own, but would have virtue of honesty. Instead, Republicans pretend that $800 billion in Medicaid cuts aren’t cuts, and that health care access and affordable and worthwhile health insurance are the same things. Republicans have been lying about this issue, among others, for years, to promulgate plans that do the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. That’s what’s toxic, Marc. It’s exhausting to be lied to, especially when the lies are meant to cover deliberate harm.

No doubt, Trump has contributed mightily to our descent into the culture of contempt. (For example, the media is not the “enemy of the American people,” Mr. President). But since Trump’s election, the scope and scale of political contempt on the left have reached unprecedented heights. Just a few months ago, when President Barack Obama was in office, it would have been unimaginable for a comedian to proudly pose for a photo holding up the president’s bloody, severed head.

You keep using that word “unimaginable”, Marc. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

That aside, you don’t seem to get that these two things are not equivalent. Kathy Griffin did something in bad taste. (Not that we need taste lectures from the people who elected Donald Trump.) She got her share of shit for it. Done. Trump, by quite stark contrast, isn’t just in bad taste. He was a year ago, but he’s President now. When he declares the press an “enemy of the people”, he’s actually threatening freedom of the press. When he bombards the nation with daily and often hourly doses of lies, it corrodes the trust that citizens and allies have in every pronouncement of our government. The damage Trump can do with a single idiotic tweet is now catastrophic, and it’s hard to live in this country day by day knowing that. That you can live with it so easily says things about you that are less than flattering, Marc.

Worst of all, we are in the process of cementing these attitudes in the next generation. On college campuses, students are being taught that it is acceptable to treat with contempt those with different ideas. We saw this phenomenon on display when Charles Murray — a distinguished conservative scholar — was shouted down and assaulted at Middlebury College in a riot that sent a professor to the hospital. Not a single student suffered any real consequences. Similar incidents are taking place on campuses across the country. Young Americans are learning that people they disagree with are not to be listened to respectfully and debated; they are to be silenced and driven out of the public square.

Again, fine, it’s awful Charles Murray and the professor interviewing him were assaulted. Violence isn’t the answer to Murray. The answer to Murray is to note that his views have already been debunked, repeat the reasons why they’ve been debunked, point out that his “different ideas” function merely to give apparent verbal and statistical solidity to what is purely racist wind, and treat him henceforth the way we’d treat a creationist or a 9/11 truther.

That said, sadly, Charles Murray remains firmly in the public square, receiving far more respect than he deserves. The same is true of Ann Coulter and even Milo Y. As long as there are right-wing audiences who either enjoy what these figures say or love how they piss off liberals, they’ll never lack for a platform or a dinner invitation.

This is not to suggest that there is no role for righteous anger in political discourse. Conservatives felt anger about many of Obama’s policies, and liberals have every right to be angry about Trump’s policies they find objectionable. And they have every right to fight like hell to stop them.

But it wasn’t so long ago that, despite bitter differences over policies, Republicans and Democrats still found ways to work together. President Bill Clinton and Republicans in Congress worked together to pass NAFTA and welfare reform. George W. Bush and congressional Democrats cooperated to pass tax cuts and education reform. Today, that kind of cooperation is unimaginable.

As for the rest, oh, thank you. You’ll allow me to be angry then? That’s right neighborly of you. Are there any other emotions I’m allowed to have, Marc? I’ll be sure to wait until I get word from you before I feel any of them.

And the reason is simple: When anger transforms into contempt, permanent damage takes place. As American Enterprise Institute President Arthur C. Brooks points out, a marriage can recover from anger. But when couples become contemptuous of each other, they will almost certainly end up in divorce court. That is where our country is headed today.

At least we reach the absurd heart of Theissen’s column. Citizenship is not analogous to a marriage. Marriage requires a level of trust and intimacy far beyond that of any other social relationship. All I require of my fellow citizens is that they follow the same laws I do, signal before they change lanes, and refrain from farting in elevators (you fuckers know who you are). I don’t have to trust them beyond that–and don’t, or there’d be no need for laws. If they do shitty, stupid things, I can think they’re shitty, stupid people. If they do shitty things that hurt me, I can be intensely pissed at them. In this, citizenship of a nation less like marriage and more like having a college roommate in the days when colleges didn’t care much who they stuck you in a dorm room with. You try to get along, but in the end, you may be stuck with someone who teaches you, by puking all over your lab notes, the pleasures of solitude. Your goal is to make it through the year without killing each other, and you might make it, but contempt is definitely going to be felt.

Liberals need to understand: When they show contempt for Trump, they are expressing contempt for the millions of Americans who voted for him — including millions who twice voted for Obama. These Americans felt that the establishments of both parties were ignoring them and wanted to send Washington a message. The response they are receiving could not be clearer: We have contempt for the man you elected, and we have contempt for all of you who put him into office. They will never forget it.

We need to pull back from this spiral of contempt before it is too late. North Korea is our enemy. Our fellow Americans who disagree with us are not. It’s time we learn the difference — before someone gets killed.

I know I feel contempt for the millions of Americans who voted for Trump, including those who voted twice for Obama. You’ve got to be a special kind of dipshit to have been an Obama/Trump voter. “I know who I want next: someone who’ll crap on everything the guy I voted for twice did.”

And I won’t forget it either. There are things I consider unforgivable. Voting for Trump is one of them. If you did that, may your hair get cowlicks right before a big job interview. May every peach you eat from this day on be mealy. May you get run over by a Bentley purchased with money that could have gone to your health insurance, you shitty, racist fuck.

Oh, and Marc, not to belabor this, but people have beenkilled, just not the people you care enough to write columns about. By an extraordinary coincidence, they’re the people Trump, for whom I’m not allowed to feel contempt, declared open season on.

Well, fuck you, Marc. I feel contempt for Trump and for the perpetrators. I consider them my enemy, a deadlier enemy than North Korea is likely to be for me. You don’t, because you’re confident they’re not coming after you and yours. I get that. I have contempt for that too, but I don’t consider it unimaginable. I get it.

I don’t write a ton of stuff on literary craft here. (I haven’t blogged a whole lot period in the last couple of months, I know.) But the Twitter chat I had with Ann B. Gelder, who spends a lot more time blogging about craft than I do, should prove of some interest to those who make the enormous life mistake of choosing novel-writing as a career. (Seriously, read her blog. It’s full of good stuff.)